The Materials We Carry

Cassandra Mayela Allen's practice is centered around care, both personal and collective. Her solo exhibition, “Desahogando: Undrowning,” at Olympia, which opens this week in New York, presents a collective history of immigrant spaces: how they become sites of both assimilation and expression. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and a shift towards pushing the boundaries of textile artworks with the incorporation of repurposed photographic materials.

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Mayela Allen's tapestries take from beauty salons, bodegas, barber shops, and other spaces where the artist finds traces of home. In Looking Sharp, 2023, a quilt of repurposed fabric and images of cornrows from barber shops present hairstyles as an important element of community. 

The artist draws from her own experience immigrating to America from Venezuela along with her home country’s displacement crisis caused by political unrest and economic turmoil. Mayela Allen began her tapestry series in 2021 with two iterations: “Maps of Displacement Vol I: NYC 2021” and “Maps of Displacement Vol II: East Coast 2022.” To do so, she collected clothing donations from Venezuelan immigrants in New York and interviewed them about their experiences. This tender, tacit reflection of her community sheds a light on the human cost of displacement and how clothes bear witness to the selves we continuously reimagine and maintain.  

Fiber has always been an intentional medium for Mayela Allen, seeped with the spirit of tradition and physical labor and an extension of the mutual aid she practices in her own life. In “Desahogando: Undrowning,” her tapestries, works on paper, quilts, and woven creations are canvases of past and present with space in between for a myriad of narratives to saturate the cloth. Her works ask the pivotal question: How do the materials we carry with us contain lives of their own?  

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“Desahogando: Undrowning” is on view through August 17, 2024 at Olympia at 41 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10003. 

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